Quote of the day

Quote of the day

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Those who want to succeed will find a way, those who don`t will find an excuse.

Leo Aguila

New IT Term of the day

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Quarantine

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To move an infected file, such as a virus, into an area where it cannot cause more harm. Antivirus softwares come with quarantine options so that the user also can keep track of virus activity.

German Hackers Claim to Bypass Chinese Firewall Security

CHINK : German Hackers Claim to Bypass Chinese Firewall Security

By John Leyden

7th August 2008

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/07/torbrowser_olympics/

German hackers have constructed a route around the great firewall of China. The Chaos Computer Club said its technology will help athletes and journalists travelling to Beijing for the Olympic Games to circumvent censorship.

Visitors to China are being offered USB sticks containing a browser that connects via the TOR proxy network. These "Freedom Sticks", regular USB drives with pre-installed copies of the TorBrowser and Torprojects software, will only be available during the two-week period of the games. The Chaos Computer Club has also set up a dedicated micro-site that offers separate downloads of the software at http://chinesewall.ccc.de/freedomstick-en.html.

In a parallel move, German digital rights activist group FoeBuD is offering similar "privacy dongles" through its web store for sale (https://shop.foebud.org/product_info.php?pName=privacydongle-torpark-auf-usbstick-p-151) at €20.

TOR point

TOR is a worldwide network of servers, run by volunteers, that provides a means to anonymise data sent over the internet. Information sent over the network is encrypted and routed through different servers on the TOR network.

China uses a network of filtering and blocking technologies, mostly supplied by Western technology firms, to block access to sites about Falun Gong, reports of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the Tibet independence movement. Until recently news reports on the BBC were also blocked.

Using proxies to get around these controls and browser sites isn't hard (at least for the tech-savvy) but maintaining anonymity is a problem, which is where the TorBrowser software and freedom sticks come in. Using the technology to send data out of China anonymously is another potentially useful application. The disadvantage of slower download speeds that come from using an anonymiser network is a minor drawback in comparison.

Chaos Computer Club is offering the technology partly to offer an easy way around Chinese censorship restriction but also to make a political point much closer to home.

Controversial new German laws on data retention may make it a criminal offence to operate TOR network nodes. The regulations are the subject of an appeal to the German Federal Constitutional Court.

"We are calling upon the German authorities to stop criminalizing the operators of servers of the TOR network. The behavior of the authorities is detrimental to the people in oppressive states, whose lives are at risk. China is only one of many examples", said Björn Pahls of the Chaos Computer Club.

Credit Card Scammer Jailed in UK

JAILED : Credit Card Scammer Jailed in UK

Daily Mirror, SriLanka

08-08-08

http://www.dailymirror.lk/DM_BLOG/Sections/frmNewsDetailView.aspx?ARTID=22745

A Sri Lankan petrol station cashier was jailed in Britain on Wednesday for helping to defraud an entire British village.

Abdul Samad Mohamed Raik cloned more than 500 debit or credit cards to steal £175,000 in a global fraud allegedly driven by links to a guerrilla group in Sri Lanka.

Barely a single household in Houghton on the Hill, Leicestershire, escaped the scam, which was carried out over a two-month period late last year.

Residents in the village, which has a population of around 1,500, had no idea that they had been targeted until learning from their banks that their accounts had been plundered all around the globe.

Leicester Crown Court heard on Wednesday how Raik, a Sri Lankan national, used a fake card reader to copy the card details of both villagers and motorists passing through the area.

Fake cards were then used to withdraw cash from the customers' accounts in countries all around the world including Australia, Senegal, India, Canada and the Philippines.

Although some attempts to withdraw money were refused, other victims of the scam lost cash which was withdrawn on the same day at locations hundreds of miles apart.

Justin Wigoder, prosecuting, said the owner of Houghton Garage, Jim Funnell, had no idea what was going on while Raik was at the till. Raik, 33, worked at the village's Jet filling station and its shop for 13 months and carried out the fraud between October and December last year.

He left his job at the end of 2007 when the scale of the scam became clear to locals.

He gave himself up to police in March. He claimed he became involved after running up a debt with a loan shark who was linked to the Sri Lankan guerrilla group the Tamil Tigers.

Raik told police he was given the cloning equipment and ordered to use it to pay off what he owed - and more besides.

The organisers also provided him with a fake Indian passport and told him he could use it to flee the country afterwards, he claimed.

Raik was jailed for two years and nine months after admitting obtaining property by deception and possessing a false passport. Sentencing him, Recorder Duncan Smith said Raik was guilty of a 'gross breach of trust' towards Mr Funnell, who 'relies on the good faith of his staff and on the custom his customers bring him'.

Internet flaw a boon to hackers

VULNERABILITY : Internet flaw a boon to hackers

07-Aug-2008

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jGvRLgfyaXN2UjsultjZ5KjVy_-w

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AFP) — Computer security professionals crammed into a Las Vegas ballroom on Wednesday for the first public briefing on an Internet flaw that lets hackers hijack traffic on the World Wide Web.

"There is bunch of weird (stuff) going on out there right now," expert Dan Kaminsky told AFP, confirming that attacks are being launched online despite efforts to conceal and patch the vulnerability in the Internet's foundation.

Kaminsky, the director of IOActive penetration testing, was met with applause and cheers when he stepped to a podium at the premier Black Hat conference to reveal details of an attack that is a boon to ill-willed hackers.

An elite squad of computer industry engineers labored in secret to solve the problem, and released a software "patch" in early July but sought to keep details of the vulnerability hidden until Black Hat to give people time to protect computers from attacks.

The Domain Name System (DNS) flaw was figured out and spread online within two weeks of the patch's release and US telecom giant AT&T was the first confirmed victim of an attack.

Kaminsky said that while businesses are still hustling to protect their Internet traffic, only 15 percent Fortune 500 companies have "done nothing" to defend their computers.

"How do you force a server to 1.badguy.com?" Kaminsky asked rhetorically as he addressed the crowd. "Oh, let me count the ways. God, it's good to be finally able to talk about this stuff."

Kaminsky stumbled upon the DNS vulnerability about seven months ago and reached out to industry giants to collaborate on a solution.

DNS is used by every computer that links to the Internet and works similar to a telephone system routing calls to proper numbers, in this case the online numerical addresses of websites.

The vulnerability allows "cache poisoning" attacks that tinker with data stored in computer memory caches that relay Internet traffic to its destination.

The flaw has existed since 1983 and may well have been exploited without victims noticing.

The vulnerability also lets hackers hijack emails and supposedly secure online transactions.

The potential for using it as a weapon in nation-sanctioned cyber war or organized crime sprees were "wide open," said Jerry Dixon, former director of cyber security for the US Department of Homeland Security.

"I've spent the last month terrified of large companies having all their email stolen because of a bug I found out about," Kaminsky said.

The vulnerability is centered in servers used by companies to access the Internet and handle email.

Home computer users whose online activities are channeled through Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or other major Internet properties should be safe because those firms have been alerted to the problem, according to Kaminsky.

"Most home users are more likely than not operating in a protected environment," Kaminsky said. "It is more likely they will be less protected at work that when they are at home."

That is because some companies have yet to safeguard their computer networks.

The patch is a temporary fix and doesn't defend against every kind of what is referred to as a "man in the middle" attack.

The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT), a joint government-private sector security partnership, is among the chorus urging people to quickly protect computers linked to the Internet.

Kaminsky built a web page, www.doxpara.com, where people can find out whether their computers have the DNS vulnerability. On Wednesday, he released details of the vulnerability on the website.

"We have to get better about fixing the infrastructure," Kaminsky said. "We got lucky fixing this bug but may not be so lucky next time."

In a warm touch, Kaminsky's grandmother Raia Maurer baked cookies for the security experts attending her grandson's talk.

"I'm so proud of him," Maurer said. "He explained it so even I can understand it."

Google Sites exploited to bypass spam filters

ABUSE : Google Sites exploited to bypass spam filters

By Matthew Broersma,

ZDNet UK

06/Aug/2008

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,62044570,00.htm

Spammers have added Google Sites to the arsenal of online tools used to get around junk-e-mail filters, according to a study published on Tuesday by messaging security firm MessageLabs.

Spammers had already been making use of Google Docs, Google Page Creator and Google Calendar as spam-hosting facilities, but Google Sites is a recent addition, according to the MessageLabs Intelligence Report for July 2008. Junk e-mailers are using the tool to automatically create Web pages with names composed of a string of random numbers and letters, resulting in an address that is more difficult for signature-based antispam tools to block, MessageLabs said.

The Google Sites abuse indicates that spammers are becoming more advanced at getting around the Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) mechanisms used to defend against the automated sign-up tools frequently used by junk e-mailers, said MessageLabs' chief security analyst, Mark Sunner.

"While Google Sites spam accounts for only one percent of all spam currently, we anticipate that this technique's popularity will rival that of its predecessors: Google Docs, Calendar and [Page Creator] spam," Sunner said in a statement.

The report found that the number of new, malicious Web sites blocked each day has increased by 91 percent, from 2,076 in June, to a daily average of 3,968 in July, with the increase largely due to Web sites linked to SQL injection attacks. This particular form of Web-based threat is now at record levels, MessageLabs said.

The study found a new form of spam that is generated by botnets controlled by the Storm worm. The spam automatically downloads a rogue anti-spyware program called Antivirus XP 2008. The program displays a false list of malware infecting the user's system and demands the purchase of a license.

Out of all the Web-based malware intercepted in July, 83.4 percent was new, MessageLabs said.

Analyzed by the industry sector of the organization receiving the junk e-mail, MessageLabs found that spam levels have actually decreased for all except the non-profit sector, in which spam rose by 5.8 percent to account for 82.2 percent of all e-mail.